Monthly Archive for October, 2005

Online word-processors

Published
by
blogmywiki
on October 30, 2005
in Uncategorized
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A while ago I had an idea for a web site - I was trying to do a bit of creative writing and found that what I really wanted was a tool that would allow me to work on a document where-ever I was. It would keep a copy of my work on a server, accessible only to me, but I could share it as a web page if I wanted. It would also allow me to download the text as plain text or in RTF format and work on it on my local machine if I wanted as well.

I could have used Blogger or something, but Blogger always puts your most recent post first, and if you’re writing a novel you want the first (and probably oldest) chapter to always be at the top.

With my site you’d be able to chip away at your writer’s block any time, any place. And you’d never have to worry about your hard-drive dying or the web hosting company going bust, as you’d always have a local copy on your own machine and one on the server.

Unlike Blogger, there would be a save button on the page to avoid those ‘oh my god all my work just vanished before I published it’ moments.

Well, I never got very far - aside from sketching out its features and finding a short, memorable .com domain name that was free.

No matter - there are a few sites that seem to offer pretty much what I was going to do. There’s ThinkFree Office Online, and the one that I’ve started testing is Writely.

Writely allows you to collaborate, publish to blogs, publish HTML if you want, you can download your work in Word or HTML format. It seems to do pretty much everything my web site would have done - it even has a save button. You can save as often as you like, and it tells you on the screen when you last saved it.

So now I have no excuse…

Mini vMac

Published
by
blogmywiki
on October 19, 2005
in Uncategorized
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The vMac project seems to have stalled, at least as far as Mac support goes, but I just found a side project called Mini vMac.

I got me a copy of System 2 and Mac Draw, a sneaky Mac system ROM and bingo! My 2005 PowerBook is now a 1986 MacPlus!

I do love the look of this - the tiny screen real-estate of the MacPlus compared to my 15 inch PowerBook. I love the minimalist beauty of the original MacOS, especially Susan Kare’s genius icons and the Chicago system font.

And don’t get me started on MacPaint. A work of art. Utterly simple, clear, beautiful software that was the template for all image editors that followed, including Photoshop.

Catching the Lincolnshire Poacher

Published
by
OtherMachines
on October 16, 2005
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

As a youth I think it’s fair to say I didn’t get out much. I used to spend Sunday mornings listening to short wave radio, mainly for short-wave pirates and English-language programmes from stations like Radio Netherlands.

But occasionally I’d hear something stranger. Weird echoing chimes or music followed by numbers read out in a mechanical voice. Some of them were quite chilling - cold female voices reciting numbers in German or English.

I now know that these were ‘numbers stations’ - almost certainly these are coded transmissions from various secret services to their agents.

Many years later I was working as London producer for NPR, and we had a man called Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. Scanner) in for an interview - he made music incorporating recordings of numbers stations. Lots of other people have done the same, such as Stereolab, Wilco, Boards of Canada and Pere Ubu.

I’d assumed that numbers stations had died out at the end of the Cold War, but a fair bit of Googling suggests they’re still with us. It might seem odd, quaint even, in the era of the internet, SMS and PGP, to still be using numbers read out over short wave. But it makes a lot of sense - there’s no route of IP numbers to trace, no records on hard drives. All you need is an innocuous radio set (and a rather less innocuous one-time pad or code-book!).

There are some fine audio clips on the web - for example at http://home.freeuk.com/spook007/ - I remember hearing the Swedish Rhapsody’s child-like voice, and it scared the willies out of me too.

A couple of the web sites I found said that at almost any time of the day or night there are numbers stations on the air. So I dusted off my short-wave radio, and scanned the dial. Maybe I’d find the Lincolnshire Poacher (MI6, supposedly active, and hey, kinda catchy!). Maybe the strange polyphonic beauty of XPH?

No. Nothing. Not even armed with a ’schedule’ for the Lincolnshire Poacher.

I think I might possibly have heard a very brief snatch of a station believed to be Algerian called ‘Magnetic Fields’ - but then again, it might just have been a radio station playing a bit of ‘Magnetic Fields’by Jean Michelle Jarre.